


Braver

by syrupwit



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-03 09:02:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13337919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/pseuds/syrupwit
Summary: There's a great deal more to Cecelia than meets the eye.





	Braver

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NeverwinterThistle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/gifts).



When Lady Delilah fell into the Void, her powers disappeared too. One by one, the other sisters lost their gifts: some at the moment of her defeat, some slowly over days. But Cecelia didn’t.

   
Even when she took the cursed bone pin from under her cap and tossed it into the Wrenhaven, she wasn’t the same.

 

  
-

 

   
Cecelia had always been easy to miss. As a middle child among many similar children, neither red hair nor freckles had distinguished her. At work, toiling in factories or cleaning shops at night, she was seldom singled out even for punishment. Occasionally a supervisor would take a dislike to her, and it was terrible to draw that scrutiny, the thousand humiliations a petty tyrant could dish out—Cecelia’s face grew darker than her hair, her voice a whisper, her eyes blurry with shamed tears. But most people forgot Cecelia, or saw her and glanced over her, or didn’t seem to notice her at all.

   
Delilah noticed her.

 

  
-

 

  
The year the plague came and the Empress died, Cecelia worked near the Legal District. She swept the streets at night. Each week, she saw a woman leaving the barrister's residence, and for many weeks she kept quiet and watched. The woman was strange and very beautiful. Cecelia had always looked at beautiful women, though on some level she suspected that she shouldn't.

  
One night the mysterious woman came up to her. "I almost didn't see you there," she said.

  
Cecelia said, "Oh, pardon me." An unspoken "my lady" tacked itself onto the end. She found herself cringing, as if waiting for a slap.

   
Instead the woman said, "It's all right, I don't mind. Would you walk a while with me?"

   
Cecelia walked with her down to the docks. The moon hung high and full in the dark sky. Barges passed, laden with cargo. A few passenger boats furtively pursued their destinations. Somewhere overhead, a pair of negligent guardsmen chatted and smoked. Cecelia and the woman stood at the edge of the water. Privately, Cecelia considered that it was romantic, if one ignored the stink of the river. Moonlight on the waves...

   
Cecelia emerged from these thoughts to find the woman studying her. Her eyes were dark and liquid, deeply hollowed, and there was the faintest trace of a smile around her lips. Something about her profile was familiar.

  
"What is your name?" she asked.

   
"I'm Cecelia."

   
"You seem to have a gift, Cecelia."

   
Cecelia was glad for the night to hide her flush. "I'm not sure what you mean, my lady."

  
Delilah's mouth quirked. "I believe you. Forgive my bluntness, but I think you've spent a long time being ignored. Even I ignored you. Tell me, how long have you been watching me?"

  
Cecelia looked down. "Two months?" she hazarded. "Maybe three. I'm sorry, I—"

   
"No need to be sorry. Like I said, you have a gift. A skill. It's not just anyone who can observe me without notice for several months. You see," and here Delilah extended her hand and dark thorny vines were growing from it, roses budding and unfurling towards Cecelia, "I have a gift too."

 

  
-

   
  
Cecelia was not a witch. She had never dreamed of the black-eyed boy, had never plumbed the Void's blue depths, could handle tanks of whale oil untroubled by phantom song. Neither madness nor luck ran in her family. She was entirely ordinary, common and invisible, and that was why Delilah wanted her. It was essential for her mission.

  
The other sisters accepted her, to a degree. It was easier that she was not to live among them. They all called each other "love," wore similar clothes, and rejected Cecelia's tentative overtures of friendship. The gravehounds liked her, though. Well, some of them. Well... She liked them, at least. One let her pet it for a whole minute once. Her hands smelled like singed bone for the rest of the day.

  
Cecelia was not a witch, and Delilah did not make her one. If she made Cecelia into anything, it was a creature just a little different and far, far worse.

 

  
-

   
  
The sisters lit dozens of tiny lamps and placed them in half-circles around the altar. They rubbed its surface down with grave-earth and charcoal, draped it in soft fabrics. From the rotting, broken ceiling, they hung bunches of bitter herbs dipped in animal blood, strangely trussed bouquets of feathers and oxrush, bundles of wire and rose-woven bones. By the time everything had been set in place for the ritual, the sun was long gone down.

  
Cecelia, still damp from bathing, had broken into full-body goosebumps even before one of the sisters took her robe and left her naked. She shivered as she ascended the steps to the altar, shook as she lay down and stretched across it. The stone was hard under her back. The others’ eyes seared like ice on her bare skin. She had never liked being stared at. 

  
Lady Delilah approached, bearing palette and brush. Cecelia quashed the welling urge to laugh. It was all so ridiculous for a moment: the conspicuously silent attendants, the heavy smell of burning oil, her Lady’s slicked-back hair. She tried to keep solemn. Then she didn’t have to try, because Lady Delilah’s eyes met hers, and she was there, held, caught. She wasn’t anywhere else.

  
The brush slid up her calf and over her thighs, the swell of her stomach, the dip of her navel. Cecelia sucked in a breath as cool paint marked her ribcage. The hair on her arms all rose when Delilah made a stripe between her breasts.

  
“I call upon the Void,” said Lady Delilah, and spoke at length of Cecelia's past, her appearance and skills, the origin and special qualities of the paint that now adorned her. Cecelia at first blushed to hear herself praised, but as her Lady wore on, she grew lulled and entranced by her cadences. Delilah's voice, unlike Cecelia's, was meant to be heard.

  
"...and erase her," Lady Delilah continued. "Make her blank, a willing canvas." Her bare hand cupped Cecelia's cheek. Heat lanced Cecelia's belly. Her Lady's words washed over her, and she was eroded.

 

  
-

 

   
Lady Delilah’s next vision found the Hound Pits, and so Cecelia was dispatched. The staff needed help around the place, someone who wouldn’t ask questions. They welcomed her. She had a bunk, three meals a day, and two baths a week if she wanted them, for at least half a year if it worked out. She’d kept worse jobs for longer.

  
Lying to Lydia was horribly, thankfully easy. Lydia took Cecelia's stutters and downturned eyes as simple nerves. The cast of condescension to her regard might once have offended Cecelia, but knowing what she did, it hardly registered. If Lydia thought of her as a base incompetent, she also treated that base incompetent to extra portions, filled Cecelia's silences with cheerful chatter, corrected her mistakes with a firm hand and a good-natured quip. Lydia was kind.

  
(For the rest of her life, Cecelia would re-live the events of the day Lydia died over and over, searching for something that could have been done, a way to save her.) 

  
Lying to Admiral Havelock was less easy, though Cecelia managed it. Samuel and Martin, she avoided; it wasn’t hard. Piero never even looked at her. She vacillated between relief and disappointment about that.

  
Once he arrived, Lord Pendleton was too often in his cups to take much notice of affairs beyond his nose. Wallace adopted the same instant disdain for Cecelia that a half-dozen predecessors had, but his attention confined itself to mundane matters such as dress and manners, not the odd hours Cecelia kept or the way no one heard her coming unless she was in their direct line of sight. Callista Curnow at first presented an issue, but she barely left her tower.

  
When Corvo showed up in Samuel’s boat, wild-eyed, freshly scarred, and reeking of the sewers, everything changed.

  
(It wasn't a lie, that he was the bravest man Cecelia had met. She hadn't met that many brave men.)

 

  
-

 

  
“A little extra courage for you, my dear,” Delilah had said, as she tucked the bone pin into Cecelia’s hair, the night before she left. She’d smoothed stray strands behind Cecelia’s ear, setting it aflame.

  
Shamed or unashamed, Cecelia had leaned into her touch. She always did. The swipe of Delilah’s thumb across her lip was like a key turning in a lock: _I’m here, welcome home_. Cecelia opened.

  
The red marks her Lady left, fingertips and nails on Cecelia's back and thighs, she thought at first were brands, marks of ownership. Later she fancied them as sacred writing. Later than that, battling the ghosts of long-departed touch, she felt they’d gouged her, cleaned her out. It hadn’t been meaning that Delilah had made; it hadn’t been that she’d added something to Cecelia. Instead she had taken something away.

 

  
-

 

  
Each night Cecelia reported to the cameo Delilah had given her, a hastily painted thing that nevertheless resembled its creator. Sometimes the cameo spoke back. 

  
At first a sister met with Cecelia twice a week. Then the plot against Daud preoccupied them, and it became once a week. Then every two weeks, then every three. Her lady's cameo stopped responding. Cecelia prayed to a god whose name she feared to pronounce even as a curse, and waited. 

 

  
-

 

   
Things Cecelia was afraid of seeing:

  
She was afraid when she first looked at Emily, and saw Delilah as a child.

  
She was afraid that she might look at Delilah and see Emily grown.

  
She was afraid that she would look in the mirror one day and see nothing at all.

 

  
-

 

_I think that if I hadn't met you, I wouldn't be brave enough to try._

  
How many times had Cecelia watched Corvo don his mask? How many times had she watched him shed it? Her Lady had spoken of him with contempt, sometimes amusement. Now his devotion seemed anything but laughable. 

  
She wanted to say:  _I'm like you_. She wanted to say:  _I have a mask too, but I can never take it off_. Instead she waited till he had eaten, washed his face, and left, and then she set out her letter and slipped away into the afternoon sun.  
  


Maybe she would find what she was looking for, out on the sea. Maybe she wouldn't.   
  


Regardless, it was time for her to find her own purpose.


End file.
